What Entity Chooses How We Respond to Global Warming?
For decades, halting climate change” has been the central goal of climate politics. Spanning the political spectrum, from grassroots climate campaigners to elite UN delegates, curtailing carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the guiding principle of climate policies.
Yet climate change has come and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on averting future catastrophes. It must now also embrace conflicts over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Risk pools, residential sectors, aquatic and territorial policies, workforce systems, and community businesses – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a changed and more unpredictable climate.
Ecological vs. Societal Impacts
To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against ocean encroachment, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this infrastructure-centric framing ignores questions about the systems that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers working in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we enact federal protections?
These questions are not imaginary. In the United States alone, a surge in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at record lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we respond to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will encode radically distinct visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.
From Technocratic Frameworks
Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the prevailing wisdom that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, covering the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are conflicts about values and mediating between conflicting priorities, not merely pollution calculations.
Yet even as climate shifted from the domain of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the economic pressure, arguing that housing cost controls, public child services and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already changing everyday life.
Transcending Doomsday Framing
The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we abandon the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something utterly new, but as existing challenges made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather continuous with ongoing political struggles.
Developing Strategic Conflicts
The landscape of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested reforms to the property insurance market to expose homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in high-risk areas like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide comprehensive public disaster insurance. The contrast is stark: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through market pressure – while the other commits public resources that permit them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more current situation: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will triumph.
